With NAPLAN coming up soon teachers will be looking for resources to help students prepare for the NAPLAN tests. Being a teacher of year 3s it will be the first time for these students to see questions presented in the manner they are in the NAPLAN tests. From experience it is important to prepare these students for the format in which the questions will be presented to them. Visiting the official NAPLAN website I discovered that they have now removed past NAPLAN test papers and replaced them with example tests. You can access these example tests by following the link bellow.

ZooWhiz is produced by the team at EdAlive. ZooWhiz is a free online learning system that covers Maths, punctuation, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, phonics and reading in a fun and creative way. Teacher’s are able to sign up fro free and then set up accounts for their students to use at school or at home. Students start by choosing their avatar and then can go about completing the more that 17,000 learning activities, either selected by their teacher, parent or themselves. Students earn coins for completed activities that they can spend at the ‘Biodome’ to purchase animals for their Zoo or go to the arcade to play mini games. If you have used any of EdAlive’s products before then the learning activities will be familiar to you. My class has started using this, and they have been highly motivated to use ZooWhiz. ZooWhiz is in public beta at the moment, so not all features are enabled yet. It is very usable in it’s current form and requires a very small amount of time to setup. I really appreciated the fact that ZooWhiz has a print option, to print out username and password cards for your students.

Study Ladder is an Australian online Mathematics and Literacy program for R-7. It provides year level resources that instructs students on skills via videos and gives them opportunities to reinforce those skills via online activities, games and printable worksheets.

Teachers are able to setup a class group, giving each student a username and password. Teachers are then able to set specific tasks for the whole class or individual students. Students are rewarded for their efforts via certificates and use of a rewards room (pictured below).

The site also provides resources for Music, Art, Language and Culture, Science, Health Safety and Citizenship. Many of the instructional activities have been designed to be used on your IWBs. There is a Naplan section with printable resources to assist with preparing students for Naplan.

The site is free for teachers, giving students unlimited access during school hours. It gives students limited access to the activities during after school hours. If students want unlimited access at home then there are paid options for parents.

I have used this site for three years now and found it to be very supportive of my curriculum in the classroom. The video explanations in particular, can be very supportive for parents trying to assist their child with homework or explaining a concepts.

It is yet another tool to make learning literacy and mathematics fun and motivates students to succeed.